Another 9-11 Conspiracy Theory

LOL! Thanks BGE, I needed that!

Thwarted Saudi Plot Another 9-11?

Interesting article but I've got to put it on major honking huge flashing yellow light alert as well.

Al Qaeda-linked plotters hoped to reproduce the Sept 11, 2001 attacks by planning to dispatch suicide pilots to military bases and launching attacks on the oil refineries that drive the economy of Osama bin Laden's homeland, Saudi Arabian officials said Saturday.

Revealing new details of the purported plot, a government spokesman said some of the 172 attackers trained as pilots in an unidentified 'troubled country' nearby, hoping to use the planes to carry out suicide attacks.

If true this is huge news, but I am absolutely not ready to buy it based on one potentially biased source. Yellow light but definitely read!

The PentaCon Video

Is here after long anticipation. They manage to find a few witnesses who claim AA77 flew north of the Citgo station, and from this they manage to "deduce" that the plane actually flew over the Pentagon. Unfortunately for their "deduction" they did not manage to find any witnesses who saw the plane fly over the Pentagon.

Update: What a trainwreck of a movie! They try fruitlessly to get people to say that they saw the plane fly over the Pentagon, which causes no end of consternation from the witnesses. The witnesses contradict each other on the color of the plane, the markings, etc, but they want us to believe they're absolutely right when it comes to where exactly the plane was. It amazes me that they claim this took them months to put together; that either tells me that film editing is not as easy as it looks, or that they're extraordinarily slow.

BBC Show

Excellent stuff.

Can't seem to get the first part up but here are parts 2-7. A little too focused on failures rather than a system-wide failure of imagination perhaps, but otherwise rather solid. I love Dylan Avery telling Popular Mechanics to go back to reviewing tractors.

Dramatic Video of Fires in WTC 7!

Kudos to Steve Spak for putting this together. It won't convince the nutbars, but it's excellent footage nonetheless.

The Dancing Jews Redux

Justin Retardo couldn't resist the new CounterPunch article giving him a hook to republish his crap about the five dancing Jews and the Israeli art students.

The story of how this line of investigation was suppressed, both in the law enforcement community and in the media, is a saga in itself. I know that Ketcham worked on this story long and hard, and had supposedly firm commitments from both Salon.com and The Nation to publish his work. Both projects were killed at the last minute, in one case an hour before it was scheduled to run. What’s particularly stupid, in the case of Salon, is that they ran his previous piece, on the "Israeli Art Student Mystery," years ago – and now refuse to follow up their own story.

And the reason for this mysterious refusal? It's because Ketcham is just recycling the same old story, with no new revelations.

As usual, Retardo takes basic facts--that five Israelis were jailed on 9-11 for suspicious behavior, that some Israeli art students were trying to infiltrate the Drug Enforcement Adminstration--and tries to weave it into Israeli foreknowledge of 9-11. But of course, the weak link is always this last part.

Ketcham, utilizing the public record, news reports, and his own sources, has painted the clearest portrait yet of the "urban mover" Mossad cell, and how they shadowed the five hijackers who took over American Airlines flight 77, which struck the Pentagon to such devastating effect. Living, working, and socializing within a six-mile radius of Bergen County, these two groups circled each other until, on 9/11, as a dark pall fell over Manhattan and much of the rest of the world, one applauded the others’ handiwork.

Oooooh, they lived within a six-mile radius of the hijackers on Flight 77! Now, as it happens, I grew up in Bergen County, New Jersey. According to the Census Bureau, Bergen County had a population density of 3,774 persons per square mile in 2000. A circle with a radius of 6 miles has an area of 113 square miles. Thus on average, there are approximately 425,000 people in a 6-mile radius in Bergen County, and that increases as you get closer to New York City, where the population is even denser.

Retardo isn't above patting himself on the back for his bravery in covering this story:

I have to tell you that it hasn’t been easy following this story over the years. I was told in the beginning, and in no uncertain terms, that this line of investigation is forbidden, that it’s "too hot to handle," and, implicitly, that the truth and the facts have to take second place to political correctness. To even mention this story, in certain quarters, is considered prima facie evidence of anti-Semitism. Case closed.

But hey, he's a tough guy and can handle the pressure; we can tell by that cigarette drooping from his lower lip.

Look, do I buy the notion that the Israelis may have been spying on the US, or on radical Muslim groups in New Jersey? Sure. Do I buy the possibility that the five dancing Jews may have insensitively celebrated the attacks because they saw it as waking up America to the dangers of terrorism? Sure. But do I buy that Raimondo and Ketcham have proven that Israel had foreknowledge of the attacks? Nope.

Update: For an exercise, check out the laughable comments on this story over at 9-11 Blogger. Remember, many of the Deniers don't believe that the hijackers existed and the rest think they were just "patsies", so Raimondo's claim that the Israelis were shadowing them causes quite a bit of cognitive dissonance, although of course many of them want to believe the Jews were responsible. When John Albanese rightly points out how hard it is to fit this into the rest of the conspiracy theory, they promptly vote his comment down three points. LOL!

They don't care if it fits any theory, it's just an opportunity to say, "Woo!"

More Proof Of the Troof

Paul Thompson (apparently) has posted a copy of an advertisement for Command & Conquer: Red Alert, which features prominently an explosion at the World Trade Center. Apparently this is considered like the Pilot for the Lone Gunman on TV; a precursor or warning.

Of course, the World Trade Center was well-known to be a terrorist target before Red Alert was released, and the explosion appears to be near the base of the towers, so its relevance to 9-11 is questionable. However, to save the Deniers some time, here are some other pop culture references to 9-11. First up, Two-Face muses about his next crime from Batman #441, 1989:



(Note: Click on pix to see them larger)

Wonder Woman crashes into the World Trade Center well before Mohammed Atta (around 1982) in this panel:



Judy Wood's Star Wars Beam Weapon gets a workout in 1940:



And here's the famed trailer for the first Spiderman film:



Update: More pop culture references here.

Update II: Thanks to JREFer Graham2001 who pointed out some other pop culture references. First, here's the plot summary for the 1978 Spiderman movie:

At the New York State University, one of Peter Parker's tutors has accidentally given three students all the materials they need to create an atomic bomb. While Peter Parker tries to find out what's happened, the police suspect him of the crime, and Peter has to deal with an attractive journalist determined to get an interview with Spider-Man. Then dastardly millionaire Mr. White shows up, and will stop at nothing to get his hands on the atomic bomb. Spider-Man must defeat this scheming villain and stop him blowing up the World Trade Centre.

A hip-hop band had planned a November 2001 release to include a picture of them blowing up the World Trade Center.

Here's a card from one of those "Magic The Gathering"-type card games:

The Band Was Playing Hava Nagila...

The Dancing Jews return along with the Israeli art students courtesy of Counterpunch, which uses up the accumulated goodwill gathered during its 9-11 Debunking series a few months ago.

But how many Deniers caught this bit near the end:

JUAN GONZALEZ: And I’d like to ask Marc Perelman, were you surprised when the 9/11 Commission Report came out that there was no mention of -- at all in the reports of possible knowledge by Israeli agents in this country of the attacks or tracking of some of these suspects?

MARC PERELMAN: Yes and no. I mean, I was surprised, because, since there have been questions that are still being asked now, that at least the commission would address the issue, even to debunk it. That being said, my reporting was narrow, was about those movers and what were they doing. And the conclusion was that they were essentially spying on radical activists in the region, and that they had been let go, because the American authorities had determined that they did not have foreknowledge of the attacks, which is different than what the article says, because it implies that they were essentially shipped to Israel because of the Israel lobby, and because they knew, whereas what I have been able to find out is that they were sent home because they did something they were not supposed to do and without the knowledge of the American government, which is an issue, obviously, that should be discussed publicly.

AMY GOODMAN: That the Israelis were spying on US soil.

MARC PERELMAN: Right, without the approval of the US authorities. Sometimes friendly governments have agreements, where they can kind of like spy together. Apparently, this was a case where it was not happening.